Coordinator
Dr. Bernd Bösel
Since April 2021, Bernd Bösel works a as postdoc and scientific coordinator of the research group SENSING: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media (founded by the Volkswagen Foundation) at Potsdam University. At the same time, he is also teaching and doing administration in the curriculum “European Media Studies”, a joint program by the University of Potsdam and University of Applied Sciences Potsdam, of which he had been a staff member since 2015. He also coordinated the German Research Council-funded research network “Affect- and Psychotechnology Studies” from 2016 to 2018.
His habilitation thesis “Die Plastizität der Gefühle. Eine genealogische Kritik der Affektverfügung” (“The Plasticity of Feelings. A genealogical critique of affect dispositioning”) was concerned with the intersection of technologies, affect, and culture. It was published in revised form by Campus Verlag in November 2021.
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Up until her appointment as a professor by the University of Bonn in April 2021, Dr. Kathrin Friedrich was acting as postdoc and scientific coordinator the the SENSING research group. In the following section, you can find details of her research program that she was conducting while being a member of our group.
Dr. Kathrin Friedrich
Adaptive Media. Tracking Technologies and Interventional Life Sciences
Contemporary medicine and livestock farming operate based on a new understanding of life and vitality that is fundamentally engendered by the design and functional logic of digital media technologies. In particular, imaging and tracking technologies, for example for movement tracking in cattle breeding, rely on and incorporate an adaptive codification of physis and digitality that, instead of being primarily geared towards observation, is directed towards decision-making and intervening in ‘living systems’. As a form of adaptive media, tracking technologies sense vital data such as respiratory movements, adjust these using technological parameters, and constitute image-based possibilities for intervention. Aliveness and operation are aligned with each other and mutually dependent in such a way that changes in one result in adjustments of the other. Media-based decisions are thereby transformed in real time by an inbuilt logic into living bodies. Adaptive media therefore require a special form of factual knowledge that considers the physical effects and milieus of media operations on a cognitive and sensory level.
This ‘digital physiologic’ that tracking technologies constitute raises fundamental questions about the conceptual and functional adaptation of media and aliveness for pragmatic, economic and social purposes in order to address pressing needs of today’s societies (e.g. improved medical treatments, increasing demand for food, efficient use of natural resources).
The book project explores the operational conditions of tracking technologies in interventional life sciences with reference to medical radiosurgery and agricultural virtual fencing. By focusing on and reformulating categories in media theory (grid, interface, space-time image, actualisation/intervention), it will both develop a systematic approach to the analysis of tracking technologies and critically review current application contexts.
Brief biography
Kathrin Friedrich is a professor for media studies: digital media culture at the University of Bonn. Prior to that, she was acting as a the scientific coordinator in the research group SENSING: The Knowledge of Sensitive Media . Previously she was a member of the Cluster of Excellence Image Knowledge Gestaltung. An Interdisciplinary Laboratory at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Kathrin is a member of the working group Adaptive Imaging and her research interests include image-guided interventions and digital imaging in the life sciences; virtual therapy; interface and software studies.